Feds Should Run Failing Airlines

By Timothy Lynch

Although Northwest Airlines declared bankruptcy, thousands of its
employees are still on strike. They're walking picket lines in many
American cities, protesting their employer's long-planned scheme to
eliminate more than three-quarters of the striking union's workforce;
to slash pay and benefits for the remainder by over 28%; and to
eliminate workers' long-ago-negotiated and hard-earned pensions. The
fight of these workers is for what all American workers want: the
human right to earn a dignified living through proud, useful
work.

In recent years, in the airline industry alone, more than 100,000
well-paying union jobs have been outsourced. Most of the remaining
workers have been forced to take steep pay and benefit cuts, have
lost pensions and are working longer hours. The outsourced jobs have
gone to much cheaper, nonunion contractors, many of whom have the
work done in other countries at despicably low wages. Jet Blue, for
instance, has its aircrafts' heavy maintenance work done in El
Salvador. Other American carriers have work done in Hong Kong and
Singapore. Wall Street analysts have been cheering the ruthless
effort by Northwest and other air carriers to "reduce labor costs,"
because they share the same goal: profit for non-working
shareholders, even at the expense of decent wages for those who do
the work.

As an elected union president intimately familiar with corporate
trickery and the insidious use of the bankruptcy courts to gut union
contracts, I'm very proud to tell you that there is a beautiful,
democratic solution to this terribly cruel state of affairs. It was
understood and explained years ago by Eli Siegel, the American poet
and philosopher, founder of the education Aesthetic Realism: "Jobs,"
he said, "should be for usefulness, not for profit." As early as
1925, Mr. Siegel explained that the profit system has always been
farcical and cruel. It is based on people who don't work, profiting
from those who do. But in 1970 he saw, and explained with abundant
evidence, that something new had taken place: partly because of the
success of unions, this unjust, inefficient way of using people was
no longer able to sustain itself. He wrote:

"There will be no economic recovery in the world until economics
itself, the making of money, the having of jobs, becomes ethical; is
based on good will rather than on the ill will which has been
predominant for centuries."

Every year since has proven him correct. Our government's own
statistics clearly show that the average wage in America has been
falling, tens of millions of industrial jobs are gone and poverty is
increasing. Private owners of industry have found that they can no
longer make profit off American labor with the ease of once. So they
have worked, with the assistance of certain government officials and
unjust labor laws, as well as the bankruptcy courts, to weaken
unions. And they have moved industries to countries that even more
effectively crush workers' rights. Economists can say all they want
about the many so-called recoveries over the years, but the hard
facts belie them: The majority of Americans are increasingly
struggling to feed their families and pay their bills. It is a cruel
charade to continue to ignore these facts.

The answer to the crisis in the airline industry is this: The US
government should simply take it over for the security and liberty of
its citizens, instead of subsidizing these absurdly run private
companies with multibillion-dollar bailouts. We the people already
own and maintain all the major airports, employ the air traffic
controllers and the security personnel. Let us stop using government
money to prop up multimillion-dollar salaries, bail out banks,
investment firms and non-working shareholders.

This answer is in the American tradition. Our federal and state
governments and hundreds of our municipalities own or control, for
the benefit of the American people, Amtrak, the post office, fire
departments, subways, bus lines, schools, VA hospitals, utilities,
highway departments and much more! And there isn't one million-dollar
salary in the lot! Despite efforts to weaken them and screams of
"inefficiency" by some with private vested interests, these entities
are generally very efficient. And, most importantly, the services are
provided for the good of the American people. And the management is
answerable to the electorate, not to Wall Street!

Eli Siegel said, and I couldn't agree with him more: "If
government by the people, why not industry by the people?"

Timothy Lynch is president of Teamsters Local 1205, based in
Farmingdale, N.Y.